by
Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | February 12, 2018
From the January/February 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
What’s on the market?
LifeIMAGE’s enterprise-grade electronic medical image sharing platform is leveraged by some of the nation’s largest health care systems, including UCLA Health, Stanford Hospital and Clinics and NYU Langone Medical Center.
“What we do is provide access to imaging and related medical information regardless of where the image was taken, on what kind of machine or where it is stored and then we get it where it needs to be for diagnosis and treatment,” explains Michela.
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In addition to moving images around a hospital, the platform also enables image sharing between different hospitals. For example, an academic medical center can send images to about 54 of its major referral sites.
One drawback to the platform is that all of the hospitals that want to share images with each other need to be on the LifeIMAGE network. To date, 1,400 hospitals in the U.S. are on the network, yet there are 5,564 registered hospitals in the nation, according to the American Hospital Association.
In May, Fujifilm Medical Systems’ Synapse Mobility Enterprise Web Viewer was granted authority to operate on networks in the U.S. Department of Defense. This solution allows providers to view all patient imaging data via the EHR or a web browser.
It utilizes the latest server-side rendering technology so providers don’t have to download any patient data locally. According to Bill Lacy, vice president of medical informatics at Fujifilm, having a server-side solution reduces the likelihood of workstation-related challenges.
Microsoft desktop software requires annual operating system and browser-related updates. If a facility didn’t have the right viewing technology to interoperate and adapt with the new EHR versions, then that can cause problems and delays in workflow.
“Trying to keep up with the desktop variability is what has been really driving a lot of the enterprise viewer activity,” says Lacy. “As of late, [the focus has been on] making sure the enterprise viewers had no desktop requirements.”
The voice recognition software company Nuance Communications offers a cloud-based image sharing platform called PowerShare. To date, 4,500 facilities are connected on the platform and about 200,000 studies are shared every month.
“Some of the large health systems spend half a billion dollars on their EHR so there is an expectation that the enterprise users are going to be working in that system, but the patient information is not necessarily there,” says Karen Holzberger, vice president and general manager for diagnostics at Nuance. “[We’re thinking] strategically about how to move that information into those enterprise systems without having to build different systems.”
At the 2017 Radiological Society of North America meeting, Nuance announced a partnership with NVIDIA to bring its deep learning platform to the PowerShare network. Working together, the companies hope to spur the development and deployment of imaging AI models into the existing radiology workflow for faster detection of key clinical findings.
